In most states, the conversation on National Signing Day I imagine is about how awesome the kids are at football. Everybody looks at the rankings, those at the top have their little ceremonies around fax machines, and then everybody hits a lot of refresh to see whether mortgaging all of your elementary schools was enough to lure that top talent to your favorite team.

Well let me explain some tings about da Great Lakes State. First of all, people in the lower p like to explain tings. The second thing you should know is we got Sparties. Holy wah do we got Sparties. And the ting about Sparties is dere everywhere, and you're not allowed to shoot 'em.

Already by this point the scripts for tomorrow are written: State can't compete with Michigan for the guys Michigan wants. Michigan wins in February, State wins in October (one time in three). Detroit has the 5-stars but Grand Rapids has the players. Hoke has changed the dynamics in the rivalry. No, services just overrate his guys. Fewer people in the state means recruiting has suffered. Mom, Michigan's making fun of me. Are we at the Zilwaukee Bridge yet? I can't answer every great question in the Great Lakes State, but I figured I might tackle a few of the factoids that float around the peninsulas every year around this time.

Did the Talent Leave with the People?

The state indeed has been losing people, although most of the people who fled Detroit didn't make it past Oakland County. Estimated population in 2012 was 9,883,360, while the 2000 census read 9,938,444. We lost like a half a percent. If you look at it against U.S. growth as a whole, Michigan's population was 3.53% of the country and now it's 3.15%, an effective drop of 11% if the shift proportionally affects people who graduated after 2001 who have football talent and the opportunity to develop football skills. If that's had an effect it's not noticeable in the small sample:

I'm not letting population shift or Rivals off the hook for no in-state 5-stars in three years; I'm saying there's more evidence that mononucleosis is to blame. And anyway can you blame them now for not giving one to Lawrence Thomas last year? What's weirder is the last three (Will Gholston, Campbell and Ronald Johnson) all turned out to be somewhat below those expectations.

Does the East Get Overrated Compared to the West?

This is a thing coaches sometimes still say, and was repeated often enough by my west side friends as truth in my college days. I don't know if it's still even said—maybe it was just the typical whining that always comes from the direction Brian Kelly is in. But we can test it a little anyway. Here's how I split up the map:

Apologies for the greenness of the blue state; the relative partiality to one school or another is another thing we ought to test. Now here's how recruits were spread across it over this period, next to the spread of games played in the NFL by players from whichever region:

The West's distribution isn't any different than its recruit contribution. Once in awhile a 2-star at a Grand Rapids-ish school may get overlooked, come to Michigan, and end up earning $12 million/year in the NFL, but most of the time those 2-stars are Obi Ezeh.

The thing that's off here—by a lot—seems to where I'm sitting…

[After the jump, something stinks in Oakland County. Other than the author I mean.]

What's up with my hometown?

Last year I made a recruiting in Ohio primer (part II) because Hoke was cleaning up down there, and people asked for a Michigan version. Maybe I will now since I built the database to get the charts above. But for now I'm just copying that format to focus in on this one region.

So this is a bit embarrassing. The Detroit suburbs contributed almost 30 percent of the recruits from 2002 to 2013, and even if I just count NFL players who joined the league after 2005 I never get more than 13 percent of Michigan-born players from Oakland and Macomb Counties. Among active players this region has produced only

Part of that is I may have lost something in the transition from town they were born in (what I have for the NFL) and school they went to, and there's lots of big private schools out here. DCC, DCD, OLSM and Brother Rice are the big contributors of NCAA talent, so take it up with them if I've misapplied guys. The other power around here is Farmington Hills Harrison, which looks like a prison and regularly pumps out serviceable college players. Getting Funchess and Ojemudia was big since that was typically an MSU feeder for years.

Are guys from here getting overrated? It is a rather well-to-do area, minus parts of Pontiac and my living room at present. The schools are among the best in the country, even the public ones. So it's not inconceivable that these players have had access to exceptional coaching and fewer distractions than the rest of the state, meaning they could be ahead of the curve. When you go through the list of the area's past blue chips it does show a lot of guys who hit their ceilings in college or soon after:

Pro Bowlers/Longtime NFL Starters: none.

In the NFL: none. Cook was a 3-star, Lang and Barwin 2-stars, Fields is a punter. Trent was waived before last season.

In College in 2012: Dion Sims was a beast for MSU. Rob Bolden transferred to LSU. Olaniyan will probably start for PSU this year. James Ross and Aaron Burbridge both showed star potential as freshmen; Jamal Lyles redshirted at State.

Just recruits: Shane Morris, Wyatt Shallman and Jon Reschke top the state's recruiting rankings but all three fell in the rankings most of the year.

Jacob Pedersen, how could you have slipped through the vast recruiting dragnet as a 2-star and morph into an All Big 10 TE? We need to be better prepared for the next 2-star product from Menominee, Escanaba, Manistique, or Felch.

towards the teams in the East of our state is because those schools typically do play better competition. At least that's the common refrain I hear when talking about Westside kids 'yeah but who did he play against'.

That is both fair and unfair since I think the OK conference is loaded with really good football programs. However there are indeed some pretty terrible programs, just as there are in the Detroit suburbs but becasue they play in tough suburban conferences they're given a pass.

Because of the way the MHSAA pairs teams the East meets West almost never happens before Ford Field, so we never really get enough data on how teams from those two sides of the state really fair against each other except in State Championship games or semi-finals, which isn't really fair.

I always thought that was an old wive's tale to explain why it looks like that. Old guys around here who remember it being built say they designed it like that because in 1970 the student riots (and Detroit riot) were very fresh in peoples' memories. Harrison is one of the white flight schools that was built for the massive population shift to the burbs in the late '60s and early '70s so that's plausible. Another plausible explanation is everything architects did in the '70s looks like shit.